There seems to be a strong inverse correlation between the use of social media and users' attention spans: as social media becomes more popular, people are less willing to spend a lot of time reading long form content. Therefore, one might conclude that the obvious answer to this dilemma is to shorten your content, otherwise known as "microcontent."

Ally Greer's insight:

While it's not desirable to make up an entire content strategy of microcontent, it's certainly important to incorporate "shareable tidbits" into longer form content as well as creating lighter, leaner pieces of content to complement that longform.

Supplement your blogposts with shareable images, give readers the option to Tweet (or otherwise share) quotes or facts from your longer blogposts, and reuse these pieces of microcontent yourself to make the most out of each minute you're spending creating content.

I also believed that highlighting and making the categories in the content prominent will help users save time. Microcontent- as you call it make be crisp and too the point but it would also mean compromising on the information or knowledge that one may want to share....I truly believe that people are getting smarter through 'self-education' that comes from reading content that has in-depth information...unless we talking about entertainment, HUGE content that adds value will always find its share of takers !!!

The Lean Cotent Marketing Blog: How to get more return on investment from content

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

Thanks for visiting! We started #LeanContent as a meetup group and soon after this topic page to share best practices, tips and strategies to get more done from content marketing when you had limited resources.

Our community has been so inspiring that we decided to make it a full-blown blog and to rebrand our Scoop.it blog "the lean content marketing blog".

Content is the fuel of marketing. But delivering enough content to generate consistent results is hard. Lean Content Marketing is a set of strategies and best practices that help resource-constrained marketers achieve ROI from their content efforts. Learn...

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

This is a webinar BrightTalk asked me to present last week on how to tackle the main obstacle of modern marketers: developing content.

Some say content is the fuel of marketing but as it became so pervasive in all marketing activities, it also became the bottleneck. At Scoop.it, we developed a framework alongside top content marketing influencers to reach ROI with content and that we called lean content marketing. In this webinar, I presented some of the key lean content marketing strategies.

Have you heard of “Lean Startup” or “Lean Innovation”? Well, then it is time to adapt the concept to lean marketing.

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

Interesting to see others look at marketing the same way we do: the lean methodology spearheaded by Steve Blank and Eric Ries for startups clearly is expanding beyond entrepreneurship. It's particularly well suited to areas which are not hard sciences and where the cost of failure can be high.

Content Marketing is a particular area of marketing which needs to be made lean by necessity for many companies. Limited resources, limited time and increasing objectives means you have to find ways to make things efficient and get ROI.

So here’s the take of several other content marketing experts on the value of repurposing content, a cheat sheet that summarizes key ideas to repurpose content (Megan’s 11 plus 4 others I added) as well as the ROI analysis of two of our own experiment with content repurposing.

It’s 5:02 a.m. on Friday as I am writing this. The dog is on the floor licking…something (he likes to lick a lot!) and my wife is asleep beside me in bed.The last 10 minutes have gone something like this:• What’s happening on Twitter? Boring.• How about Facebook? Someone else got engaged. Yay for them.• Any new emails? Delete. Delete. Inbox Zero!• Hmm…

Ally Greer's insight:

We've all been where Bryan Harris was when he wrote the above introduction to this post. As bloggers or content marketers, we always hear that voice in the back of our heads.

When are you going to just sit down and write that post? What are you even going to write about? How are you going to actually make an impact with the finished product?

This post validates one of the core values of Lean Content Marketing: leveraging existing information and communities that you already have access to to enhance your content marketing efforts.

Bryan goes on to describe his newfound writing process. He checks the analytics of his most recent tweets, finds the ones with the most clicks, then turns the central idea behind each one into a question that he can answer in the form of a blogpost.

Another method that Bryan mentions is checking Quora for someone already having asked the question you want to ask to get more insight into what knowledge you can provide. After all, one of the goals of content marketing is to teach your current and future clients the things that they want to know that you already do know.

One way to inspire content creation that I would add is to experiment with content curation. Curator @Martin (Marty) Smith has been utilizing this method from day one. He created a process to inform his content creation that involves curating a post on a similar topic to his website's content hub, checking the analytics of that post, and then deciding whether or not his audience has a high enough interest in that topic to write his own post about it.

With the new analytics on Scoop.it, you can generate reports involving metrics such as audience engagement, views, shares, time of day at which the most views were generated, and more. When a piece of curated content has a high success rate, perhaps it's time to expand on that for your audience and provide the value that only you can provide by creating an original post of your own.

- Second, the notion that content marketing is becoming more and more an iterative process is highlighted by Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. Something we've defined as a core component of the lean content methodology.

Content is King! Content is also EVERYWHERE... In your face with emails.. In your social streams, sponsored updates, every new app claims to be a "news feed" but nobody has the time needed to read and sort through EVERY blog post!

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

We're all like @Brian Fanzo running out of time and trying to have more impact. These are great ways to save time on content sourcing which should help:

In this blog post, I’m going to introduce you to three awesome tools to create the best infographics, tell you how to use them AND how you can share your infographics in different channels all over the web. So, let’s get started!

We've tried Piktochart ourselves and it's a really neat tool for that purpose: intuitive and without much to learn, it takes a limited amount of time to deliver something good enough to share. A good series of lean content tools.

SometimesDoes it feel like you’re working a 25 hour day yet you’re still drowning in the ocean that is online marketing? As a Marketing Team of One you need to perform the same tasks that any u…

Ally Greer's insight:

Not everyone is lucky enough to work with a huge team of marketers, and those people also happen to not be lucky enough to get more hours added to their day!

This list contains some great tools to keep your content marketing lean when you're working with limited resources. My personal favorite is Canva. I love using that to create quick & dirty graphics.

I'd also add Skitch & Trello. Skitch is a great screenshotting tool that you can install for Mac and use to mark up images with arrows, text, circles, etc. Trello is another one that I can't live without. I'm on a content marketing team of two and we use Trello to manage our strategy in a lean way; keeping track of ideas, what's in progress, and what's been completed.

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If you're an SMB or part of a #leancontent marketing team, join us on Facebook to talk content strategy with a lean mindset.

If you're a marketer looking for an easy way to discover content, share it on social media, and publish it to your website, get a demo of Scoop.it today.

Not everyone is lucky enough to work with a huge team of marketers, and those people also happen to not be lucky enough to get more hours added to their day!

This list contains some great tools to keep your content marketing lean when you're working with limited resources. My personal favorite is Canva. I love using that to create quick & dirty graphics.

I'd also add Skitch & Trello. Skitch is a great screenshotting tool that you can install for Mac and use to mark up images with arrows, text, circles, etc. Trello is another one that I can't live without. I'm on a content marketing team of two and we use Trello to manage our strategy in a lean way; keeping track of ideas, what's in progress, and what's been completed.

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If you're an SMB or part of a #leancontent marketing team, join us on Facebook to talk content strategy with a lean mindset.

If you're a marketer looking for an easy way to discover content, share it on social media, and publish it to your website, get a demo of Scoop.it today.

When visitors come to your website, what exactly are you feeding them? Have you ever stopped to think about it? Is your copy like a greasy burger and fries that you didnt put much thought into picking up, or more like a lovingly prepared home cooked Sunday supper with all of the trimmings?

Why the food comparison? Well, its actually quite logical. Your web copy provides your visitors with the information that they need to decide whether or not they want to purchase your goods or services. So in essence, your copy is food for their buying decision. The question is, do they leave your website properly satiated or will they find themselves hungry for something more substantial mere moments later?

The best way to ensure that your content provides readers with the information that they need to pick up that phone or submit your online form is to supply your cooks (aka your writers) with fresh, nutrient-dense ingredients. Truly nutritious content should have your fingerprints all over it. It should be redolent with your unique brand voice, toothsome with hearty information, and it should linger in their minds like a fine wine on the palate. If you want to convince them and convert them it is essential to offer something more than fast food copy.

"As content marketing has become a vital strategy for brands and agencies, the need to measure the success of that content has grown as well. An Aberdeen Group report revealed that the most effective content marketers are also those most likely to measure."

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

This report by the Aberdeen Group highlights the need to measure results as a key success factor in content marketing.

Beyond this key findings - companies which measure tend to do better - there are interesting numbers as those in the above chart. The companies surveyed in this report had a customer acquisition cost of $20-$30,000.

Does this feel a lot to you?

Well, if you're a leading Enterprise software company with an average deal value in hundreds of thousands or millions, it makes perfect sense. But for the vast majority of small and mid-sized companies, this is a lot because what they sell is the hundreds or at best thousands of dollars.

So what I'm getting from this data is that SMBs need to work in a leaner way:

- first by measuring (I agree with the data on that)

- second by optimizing their conversions all through the funnel (237-350 marketing responses to close a deal is not lean at all): focus on the topics and the questions your potential customers are interested in.

- but perhaps more importantly by reducing your content costs through lean content tools and techniques: introducing content curation in the mix is a great way to do that with a cost per piece of content published 7x to 10x lower.

Whether you’re brand new to blogging or are an experienced blogger who’s struggling to find the time to keep up with your schedule — content curation can help.

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

Some people have opposed content creation and content curation, the truth is the latter helps the former. While there's no denying that good original content can go a long way, curated blog posts under any of the 4 types described in this article are much easier and faster to produce and can be as educational - and therefore as successful - for your audience.

Guest blogging is one of the most effective and widely used methods for gaining exposure via sites other than yours, and it is one of the least expensive ways to gain access to new audiences, increase traffic to your website, and help create a brand for yourself.But measuring the effectiveness of a guest-posting campaign is where most people go wrong.

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

There are a lot of bad reasons to do guest blogging - including bad and outdated SEO tactics that no longer work - but there are also very good reasons to do so which is why it's one of the lean content marketing best practices.

While measuring the impact of guest blogging remains ambitious in my opinion, this post frames what to expect when doing proper guest blogging: more visibility, more distribution. I find however that #5 - lead generation - is a stretch and I wouldn't recommend to guest blog to generate leads. Yes, a good guest post will send some traffic to your site (but maybe not as much as you expect) and some of it might convert if your site is optimized for that. But it's a long shot.

Another reason which is more valid in my experience to justify guest blogging is to expect thought leadership development by contributing to well established blogs in your industry. The association of your brand with an established one acts as endorsement and will add credibility to your next pieces and your blog.

There are many misconceptions about how companies are “supposed” to implement content marketing. And in a perfect world, with a hefty marketing budget and infinite resources, all of us would execute content marketing the “right” way. Unfortunately, that often isn’t the case.

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

Or I would say: fortunately.

Because if you believe some of the gurus of content marketing, it might look much harder than you think.

Vertical Measure's Arnie Kuenn makes a great job at debunking 8 common mistakes or myths which are often believed about content marketing.

A great post showing how content marketing can - and for many SMBs should - be lean.

"Mistake #5: Content Has To Be Perfect & Long" I agree. A 140-character tweet is a content. It's probably the shortest content but believe it, it can still attract attention - especially if it contains a link and photo.

When it comes to customer connection and engaging your audience, every brand is faced with one key question: Where does my content come from? Content comes in many forms, and it is the driving force behind generating leads and engagement online. Finding content on its own can be a challenge for any business leader: going beyond that and finding content that compels and converts can make any marketer scratch their head.

Isn’t it funny how the Internet is jam-packed with content, yet coming up with content on your own feels like a hike up a huge mountain? How do these companies crank out unbelievably engaging content week after week without skipping a beat? What do they have that you don’t?

Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com's insight:

Great article by @JuliaEMcCoy with a ton of helpful tips on content curating using a tool like Scoop.it followed by content auditing. I like how Julia covers what next after content curation.

Here is a snippet of the what's next.

So, You Have Your Awesome Content Ready To Go: Now What?

"Thanks to your tools of the trade for content curation, now you have a good bit of content to share and ideas building in the back of your head. Once you have all of your content in front of you, the next logical step is to create an editorial calendar to keep yourself on track.

Content editorial calendars are useful to organize your content, blog topics, and social sharing schedules. Instead of randomly selecting days and times to post your new content, using a content calendar will help give your strategy structure. Editorial calendars keep you focused, and they offer a platform where you can monitor and measure your results.

If you are serious about making your content marketing quest a success, it is a smart move to develop a template for your needs and stick to it. You will find your content marketing and development will run a lot smoother, and hopefully it will help keep fresh ideas flowing for your audience.

As those ideas to continue to flow, you will build up quite a content base overtime. Your collection of content will continue to grow, and eventually there will come a time where this content will need reviewed for performance purposes; this is known as a content audit."

At first, spending under half an hour on managing social media may sound like a tall order, especially considering that an average user spends approximately 3 hours on social media per day. Before you commit to the new schedule, analyze your current one: which social media network do you visit first? Do you go through the same steps for each network every time, or prioritize your actions on the spot?

Another important consideration before you create your speedy social media management plan is what social networks your business needs to be on. Time equals money, especially for a small business—each minute wasted on a social network your audience doesn’t frequent is a minute you could spend interacting with your current and potential customers on a different channel. In the sample plan, we will go over the 5 major networks—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram—and steps you can follow with each one.

Instead of dividing your plan by network, we’ve divided it by blocks dedicated to an important social business activity. You may go over the 18-minute mark in the first few tries as you adjust to the new rhythm; but once you familiarize yourself with the routine, you will never waste a minute on extraneous social media activity again. Become a social media management rockstar with this 18-minute-a-day social media plan for small businesses.

Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com's insight:

This article by Olsy Sorokina @HootSuite shares many great tips to help you with your lean content strategy and save you time with social media.

Using the combination of content curation power of Scoop.it and the social networking power of Hootsuite you can move from sharing to engagement and lead generation with a few easy steps.

Already have HootSuite account you can integrate Scoop.it within the HootSuite App Directory

Don't know what to share here is a tip from the article.

On Facebook, choose storytelling, visually rich messaging. Limit your posts to 1-2 a day.On Twitter, if you schedule Tweets, make sure to space them out, to avoid being perceived as “spamming” your audience. Include Tweets with different formats—photo, video, different placement of the links—to test which ones perform best. If you are sharing content from an external source, include the appropriate hashtags and @mentions.On LinkedIn, share content with a more serious tone, oriented to a professional audience, through LinkedIn’s publishing platform.On Google+, share any news from your business, as well as external content relevant to your business, your field, or may otherwise be interesting to people in your Circles.On Instagram, plan photo content to complement social media messaging on your other, less visual channels. If you have a campaign or a product release coming up, schedule a photo to spread awareness among a bigger audience. Instagram also presents a great opportunity to give your customers an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at your business and the people who run it.

A good reason to determine which social media networks are best for your business:

"Time equals money, especially for a small business—each minute wasted on a social network your audience doesn’t frequent is a minute you could spend interacting with your current and potential customers on a different channel."

Before you create your speedy social media management plan considers what social networks your business needs to be on. For a small business—each minute wasted on a social network your audience doesn’t frequent is a minute you could spend interacting with your current and potential customers on a different channel

There are many content types and tactics for content marketing. Each has it's place. Each offers unique benefits. Creating original content on an ongoing

Guillaume Decugis's insight:

As a kid my favorite game was to play Lego and build, deconstruct and rebuild stuff (spaceships mostly: I'm a geek...). As a father, I've been fascinated to see that construction game becoming my kids' favorite too and see what they came out with in terms of new ideas to build.

Are you thinking of your content as modular with lego-type building blocks?

Leed Odden says you should because you'll then be able to turn mico-content into eBooks and then blog posts, newsletters, etc... And vice versa.

Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter group came out with the turkey leftover analogy to explain how you could turn epic content such as an ebook or a white paper into many other pieces of content with only marginal additional work. It's interesting to complement that with the opposite approach and plan your micro-content so that it can fit into something bigger.

As Lee Odden points out, content curation plays an important role if you want to pursue this strategy: "Curation of micro-content is easy, provides useful information to your target audience".

And because of the many benefits he describes with social and SEO, by assembling your Lego content blocks into an awesome content spaceship, you might realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In this compilation of perspectives for the future of B2B Marketing, he curated views from dozens of influencers on what they felt the future would bring. And he of course added his own insight on slide 36 which is very interesting because you get that the concept of the whole slideshare is precisely that: Participation Marketing.

His point is that content marketing works as it gets B2B buyers through 60-90% of the sales cycle before they even call sales.

The problem then?

Scaling it.

What he offers as a framework to scale this is Participation Marketing which means involving not only influencers or guest contributors but also current customers and your target audience in your content creation process.

on the evoluNewsroom ethnographer Angèle Christin studied digital publications in France and the U.S. in order to compare how performance metrics influence culture.

Ally Greer's insight:

Great read on the evolution of journalists from those in the 60s who were concerned mostly with the opinions of their colleagues to those today who sit in front of monitors and watch real time analytics.

The results of the study mentioned here are also pretty interesting for marketing as brands are increasingly adopting the "publisher" mindset.

Staying on top of analytics on a consistent basis is one of the most important parts of becoming a brand publisher and ensuring you're doing the right thing to meet your objectives.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.